A recent article posted at a Jacksonville news affiliate website, “News4Jax,” suggests that kids TV shows should push more climate propaganda and environmentalist content in order to “empower” them to act on those issues. This is just advocating for yet more activist content, of which there is already plenty. Young people are already largely afraid of the future, and this will not help.
The article, “Toddlers and TV: Making screentime matter for children concerned about climate change,” quickly introduces the idea that a majority of kids are scared about their futures because of climate change. News4Jax writes that a recent survey found “54% of children are fearful about what climate change will mean for their future,” and goes on to say that television shows “can be a powerful tool for fostering environmental awareness.” The post quotes an educational scientist from the University of Rhode Island who explains how kids’ shows can be used as vehicles for a particular message, and can even make kids “feel like collectively they can do things to help our earth,” or in other words, encourage them to engage in climate activism.
If the goal is to assuage kids’ fears about the future, however, hitting them with yet more climate alarm propaganda is not going to help.
Climate Realism has covered how the media is largely to blame for anxiety and fear surrounding climate change, in posts here, here, and here, among others. The media and educators already are constantly telling kids that the planet is facing an existential threat in climate change, and that their futures are uncertain unless massive world-spanning action occurs to stop it. When that action does not happen, kids become understandably despondent. What makes this so sinister is the fact that the Earth is not, in fact, in existential danger because of the modest warming of the past century or so. Nor is it in danger of becoming unlivable, as the media likes to claim.
Kids are already bombarded with this kind of alarmist language. The news their parents watch and the news that gets pushed to feeds on social media are all constantly filled with climate change related content, tying every bit of less-than-pleasant weather to climate change, as this website constantly covers and refutes. In schools, climate alarmism can be promoted in every single class—including even physical education or gym class—as was the case in certain schools in New Jersey. This kind of bombardment starts on kids as young as elementary school, which the media lauds. Multiple generations of kids have now grown up being told that their future is doomed.
Further, a recently released U.S. Department of Homeland Security report on existential risks finds that climate change does not fall into that category and explains that activists and media enablers making such claims are expressing worldviews, not science.
In reality, climate related deaths are down 99 percent over the past hundred years, world undernourishment is dropping, and the earth is actually becoming more lush with plant life. Extreme weather is not getting worse, either, and neither are wildfires.
Kids do not need yet another source of climate misinformation and alarm in their lives, they already have far too much exposure to it. News4Jax should be more skeptical about this kind of cheerleading for climate content, especially since as a media outlet, they are themselves a major source for kids’ and adults’ unreasonable anxiety about climate change.
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I just wonder if it actually has the opposite effect on kids, just as it does adults. The media constantly trying to whip up climate fear year after year, but after while the kids just tune it out and become numb to it. You know, if someone is always yelling WOLF! WOLF! The sky is falling! and nothing ever happens, well, just ignore him.
Kids aren’t as quick to pick up on this. It’s evolutionarily hard-wired into us as children to generally trust adults. Once they’re indoctrinated it takes a lot of desconstruction (and life experience) to eliminate false or unjustified beliefs.
And not always successfully.
I’m with Tommy2b on this–kids are taught that “teacher knows best”, which is why so many kids get confused about whether boys can become girls or girls can become boys, when nobody even thought of that 10 years ago.
For a child trying to learn about how the world works, “science” is fascinating, and kids are more willing than adults to accept what a “scientist” says because they don’t have the knowledge to question unproven theories.
It is up to parents of young children, people in their 30’s and 40’s, who have enough experience with climate and weather to realize that they haven’t changed much since 1980 or 1990, and dispel the fear that some teachers try to instill in their children.
But it is not only young children who need to be taught the truth about climate change. Even this past Sunday, there was a discussion after church about the consequences of the recent election, and an elderly former pastor was worried about “the glaciers melting”, and whether the new “drill, baby, drill” president would aggravate the problem.
I pointed out to him that sea levels have been rising at a rate of about 2.5 millimeters per year over the past century, which (if continued) would result in a sea level rise of about 10 inches over the next century. If that was a flooding threat to low-lying coastal cities, it would be far cheaper to build seawalls to protect them than to supply energy to 8 billion people using windmills and solar panels.
And Denmark …
NEWS TIP
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2024/11/not-babylon-bee-denmark-implement-worlds-first-tax/
on cow and pig farts ..
People younger than adults, as well as many physical adults who, perhaps, haven’t matured well, are very susceptible to new (to them) ideas. It seems to be much more than just being open to new ideas, more like fixating on something that has a god “sound” of “feel” and accepting it without questioning.
In USSR it did. As in, propaganda was converted into rude jokes and/or filk, if at all possible.
“Peaceful Soviet Tractor” («…and if they don’t stop provocations, we will send a harvester»), “«Communism is Soviet Power plus electrification of the entire country», therefore Soviet Power is Communism minus electricity”, etc.
Russian string quartet: A Soviet orchestra back from a US tour.
Propaganda as said in the title of this post is correct. This b.s. should not be allowed on matters of importance to the public and nation. Perhaps Trump can make some sort of rules to restrict it since there is no place for indoctrination of U.S. public / citizens on important matters of safety which the has some responsibility regardless of freedom of speech etc. Same as falsely yelling FIRE in a crowded room / gathering of U.S. citizens… applies to anyone even if you are Greta Thunberg, Swedish climate change activist.
Cleaning the education system from indoctrination and brainwashing should be his first task. Net 0 on Woke.
“He alone, who owns the youth, gains the future.”
– Adolf Hitler
“Give me four years to teach the children and the seed I have sown will never be uprooted.”
-Vladimir Lenin
Both those smart-alecky tyrants still cast a long shadow, even though both inflicted immense damage on already-suffering humanity, and both tyrants came to bad ends in middle age.
Lenin got himself so worked up about changing the world, that he suffered a series of strokes and died at the age of 53. Hitler managed to turn most of Europe into a graveyard during his bloodthirsty career, then put a bullet through his head at the age of 56.
People eager to follow their examples might take these miserable facts into consideration.
The old rethorical question, however, stands:
Create Climate Jugend and Green Shirts. It is the goal of every dictatorial style of government to indoctrinate them as young as possible.
Biden already formed the Youth Climate Corps, complete with living stipends and uniforms.
Funny how the media stories about creeping fascism are actually on point.
They just misidentified who the fascists are.
Let’s see…
Climate Jugend…
Ministry of Truth…
Attacking political opponents with lawfare…
Sounds like…Democrats!
If it looks like a duck, swims like a duck, and quacks like a duck, then it probably is a duck.
Having lived most of my life in the greater Jacksonville metro, I can tell you that a vast majority of kids in this area aren’t watching News4Jax. So it’s propaganda being viewed by a small segment of people.
You start with this, then you’ll go on to talk crazy things, like the kids not being duly impressed by posters like «Homework rules!» Please be careful, there are education professionals in the audience, this may shock them into self-reflection. ;]
Perhaps better programming on hard science, math, statistics, history, and economics, which would inoculate kids from fear-based junk science.
Perhaps funny cartoons and Sesame Street A,B,Cs would work.
A great strategy is to push the little buggers out the door to experience weather firsthand. We didn’t have a TV (a black and white one) until I was 10. Back then, kids could go outside unattended by parents. Also, it was just a 1/2 mile to forest land that went on for miles. We learned of plants, birds, deer, and snakes without books, TV, or nosy adults.
Ah those were the days –
disposable kids! 🙂
(disclosure – I was one too, John.
And I believe that we’re all the better equipped for life as a result of those childhood experiences.
Especially the hours spent down at the local creek where the kids’ forum debated the best ways to survive the constantly-predicted inevitable nuclear exchange.
Climate crisis? – pffftt! )
The liberal, all-in, existential threat, CAGW, reporters and commentators aren’t going to stop pounding children with scare tactics, until the news sources stop hiring people so stupid that they believe their own lies. Don’t wait for it.
Boosters, boosters, boosters will make them think.
The article, “Toddlers and TV: Making screentime matter for children concerned about climate change,”
Making children concerned about climate change. Like it or lump it, they’re going to do it.
My kids all whined when they were cold and hungry.
I told them farms don’t work in the wintertime, so they were out of luck.
“But there is plenty of food at school and the cafeteria is warm”, they said.
So I told them school is where they ought to go to hang out.
“Climate Change”.
The new boogeyman (or monster under the bed or hiding in the closet or etc.) to scare little kids.
Very nice Linnea. It is easy to understand why these monsters are reduced to scaring kids. That is all they have left. They don’t have the science necessary to convince adults of their nonsense so they are reduced to scaring the crap out of kids. They are the lowest of the bottom feeders.
Are they?
A large part of the problem is a poorly-balanced science curriculum devised by left-leaning types who see it as a tool to spread alarmism; and when teachers’ knowledge of climate change doesn’t extend past this curriculum, it’s no wonder the students get only a single viewpoint. Fortunately as the students reach into their teens, their general skepticism levels rise, and they’re not so willing to swallow the climate crisis drivel so fast. Another thing is even more likely: they’re not going to adopt lifestyles that forgo anything associated with fossil fuels like cars, motorbikes, air travel, electronic items, and coal/natural gas generated electricity. Nor will they forego red meat or adopt vegan diets and travel only by bicycle or public transit. In other words, as they mature, they’ll increasingly scoff at the climate con job.
I recall growing up in the 1960s, sure that we’d all die in a nuclear war, and it really affected my life choices and what I thought was worth doing. Maybe I was stupid, but plenty of people were building fall-out shelters. Crippling a whole generation with fear is a terrible thing, and hyper-alarmists should be held accountable.
While babysitting my grandkids during the COVID Lockdown by the end of the first day I determined that nearly eighty percent of the “Children shows” had at least one and usually two provably false statements about “Global Warming” and/or actions they should take to reduce CO2 to “Save The Planet” that actually add to the cost of “controlling climate change. E.G — [ My city doubled the cost we pay for collecting trash by adding separate containers for Trash and Recyclables. ] I later learned that the city actually has to pay more to collect recyclables than to simply collect everything as TRASH.
“Sinister” is precisely the right word to describe people whose livelihood revolves around frightening children with doomsday scenarios — especially when those scenarios entail cherry-picked data, unprovable speculations, and a power-hungry agenda.
Children find out soon enough that some adults are dishonest and untrustworthy. Climatistas have no apparent pangs of conscience about throwing themselves in with that scurvy bunch.
Kids don’t need propaganda about ANYTHING.
They need to be allowed to be kids, free of predatory messaging, free of pathetic control freak politicians that arrest their parents for letting them play football alone on massive green spaces where no car ever drives.
They do need parents to educate them about not getting burned in hot sunshine, about protecting their eyes from intense UV light, about the dangers of coastal currents if they swim in the sea (if where they swim has currents of that nature), about times when avalanche danger can be high in mountain regions.
They do need to learn about Rossby waves sometime or other, about the interplay between low pressure zones and high pressure zones and how that causes some days to be hot and sunny and some days to be wet and windy.
In some parts of the world, they may need to learn the importance of conserving water and the best ways to do that, just as they can learn experientially how covering soil with woodchips can conserve moisture in the ground, can create a rich soil ecosystem over time and how forest floors are stable ecosystems feeding themselves without any need for human intervention.
Let kids play football, ride their bikes, climb trees, go learn to fish, learn to sail, learn to swim, learn to grow tomatoes.
Some will naturally gravitate to an interest in the weather and, in time, the climate.
Let them gravitate there on the back of curiosity, not propaganda.